Olivia (19 page)

And then she saw the stalactite-teeth around the opening to the commons.  Dark, of course.  Quiet.  Really, she had no idea why she’d wanted to come here at all.  But as she was turning around to make her meandering way back to Vorgullum’s lair, she noticed a faint glow emanating from a subchamber, and heard a rumble that might have been the speech of the creatures.  Without thinking, Olivia moved closer, but then, she must have been thinking just a little bit because she turned her flashlight off before she peeked inside.

At first, she couldn’t quite track what she was seeing.  Oh, she saw the gullan, but at first, she only saw one of them and she had no idea what he was doing.  He’d pulled one of the benches out from the wall and appeared to be standing over it, hunched over something, his head bent low and wings tightly compressed.  There were two candles on the floor, casting huge, writhing shadows on the wall.  Olivia looked at those shadows, frozen in the mouth of the tunnel where she could be easily seen if only the gullan turned his head just a little and opened his eyes.

But his eyes were shut, and some small, critical part of Olivia’s brain could not help but observe that they were probably shut because the gullan female he was screwing was absolutely baboon-butt ugly.

She really was, poor thing.  Not ugly the way Murgull was, all raised scars and hairless patches, but ugly the way that only God could make, with a low sloping brow, jutting jaw, bulbous snout and beady eyes.  Her head was too big for her body; her face, too small for her head.  She lay flat on the narrow bench, her wings spastically slapping half-folded at the floor, her legs thrown wide, and her wrists trapped together and pushed into her soft belly by the male who rode her.  When she uttered another of those babbling moans, he put his other hand over her mouth and pressed down hard without even opening his eyes.  He thrust slowly and with great force, his lips parted in the rigor of lust to show the sharp tips of his fangs, and while Olivia couldn’t see enough of his shadowed, snarling features to make out a face, she knew him all the same. That bristly mane down his back was unmistakable.  He was Cheyenne’s captor. 

All the blood in Olivia’s body fell out of her in an icy gush and then poured back in on fire.  Her feet unlocked.  She stumbled back, both hands pressed over her own mouth to keep the howls of her breath from being audible over the female’s muffled groaning.  If Vorgullum had heard Tina say the world ‘carrot’ from clear across the wide commons, then the gullan had exceptional hearing, and even if the caves didn’t echo the way they did in the movies, she didn’t dare break into a run.  Instead she forced herself to walk slowly and silently all the way back to the main passageway, and then she ran.

Her shoes were right where she’d left them, their shadows jittering in the light from her shaking flashlight.  She scooped them up and climbed into the entry room, every scrape of her claws screaming in her ears.  She did not feel safe until she was all the way back in Vorgullum’s sleeping room, standing in the light of his little fire, listening to his steady snoring breaths.  There, she made herself sit quietly on the nearest bench, until she looked down and saw that she was seated on the same sort of bench the gullan had been using to have sex on.  Looking closer, she could see grooves where the wings of the prone partner were supposed to fit.  God, this was the bench they ate off and the whole time it was a…a gullan marital aid!  She slapped her hands over her mouth again, this time to keep in the giggles.

The image of those two gullan would not leave her head.

God, that was embarrassing.  About the raciest thing she’d ever walked in on before had been her parents making out a little in the kitchen one Sunday morning, and once, in the bathroom in the girls’ dorm on campus, she’d overheard two teachers she half-knew compare techniques on how to give ‘mind-slamming good head’, but she had never actually walked in on anyone.  He would have seen her if he’d just opened his eyes.  Heck, he probably could have reached out and grabbed her.

The urge to giggle died all at once, killed by some unknown quality of that image, of Cheyenne’s captor looking up, his eyes shining red in the candlelight and that snarl still on his face.

Her mom had been right about her all those years: She had more imagination than she knew what to do with.

Olivia took her climbing claws off and put them under the bench.  She came around to her side of the pit and started to crawl in.

Vorgullum stirred and lifted his wing for her without really waking up.  She pressed up tight against him, which he didn’t mind a bit until he dropped his wing back over her.  Then he yelped sharply and looked at her in astonishment.  “Where have you been?  You’re cold!”

“I know,” she whispered, and chattered her teeth for effect.

He wrapped her first in a sleeping bag, then in his arms, and then in a wing.  He tucked his chin over the top of her head and she breathed in his reassuring scent, wondering just when it had become a comfort to her.  “Did you use your claws?” he asked.

She could detect no threat in his sleepy voice, but still she hesitated.

“Yes,” she admitted.  “Just down to the common cave and back.”

“They work for you?”

“Yes.  Very well.”

He chuckled.  “That will please Sudjummar.  They were his idea.  He has always been so good…”  He yawned into her hair and adjusted her into a better pillow for him, mumbling, “…thinking up things.”

He surely hadn’t meant to let the name slip, knowing as she did what Maria the Mojo Woman had done to Grunn (and no, she didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the gulla, thinking as she did that threatening a man’s soul with a dirty trick and a candle was still nothing in comparison with being kidnapped in the first place), but she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Who is Sudjummar?”

“Mm?”  She felt him wake up a little, rubbing at his face.  “He’s our metal-maker.  He made your claws.  I said that, didn’t I?”

“You’ll tell me his name, but not yours?”

The words hung there.  He propped himself up on one arm and looked at her until she dragged her eyes up to meet his.

“My name is Vorgullum,” he said quietly.

She stared at him.

“All right?”

She nodded.

He smiled and bent over her to nuzzle at the side of her neck, and soon was snoring again.

5

She dozed off and on until Vorgullum started stirring.  She’d been unable to sleep again, despite the fact that she was now bone tired, so she squirmed away from him and sat up.

“It is early,” he mumbled, pushing himself first to his knees, then to his feet.  “You don’t have to be awake.”

“If I go back to sleep now, I’ll be up all night again,” she complained wearily.  And then, “Where do you go all day, anyway?”

“Where do I not?” he grumbled, chasing out a coal to light a candle.  “I meet with the others who have mates and try to advise them.  I meet with the Eldest to see how our stores are filled.  I meet with my
sigruum
and my chief hunter.  I meet with old Murgull if I don’t see her coming.  Then, I leave the mountain to hunt.  We have to take as much game as we can find now, because soon the humans will come to hunt too, and after that, it will be winter.  A difficult winter,” he added, looking grim in a distracted way.  “We have been relying entirely upon our women to keep us fed for too long.”

“Why?” Olivia asked.

He started to answer, then shut his mouth with a snap and finished dressing.  As he was cinching the stays on his belt-pouch, he uttered an uncomfortable, throat-clearing growl, and said, “We have time enough to fill our stores before winter, if the Great Spirit favors us.  Game is plentiful, for the moment.  There will be fish in the water for some time yet.  The fruits are ripe in the human lands, and if we are clever, we can take what we need without drawing attention to ourselves.”

“You take food from humans?”

“Oh yes,” Vorgullum said.  “They grow all kinds of food, far too much for even a large tribe to eat.  We steal from them whenever we can, but it is a long way to fly and we can only take away what we can carry.  For now, the weather is fair, and so the humans come right up into the forest, just to sleep for a few days and then go away again.  We make a little noise—”  He uttered a particularly vicious snarl to demonstrate.  “—and they run into their metal boxes and go away.  Then we can raid their camps for the things we can use.”

“You’re going to get shot doing that,” she remarked.

“It is a risk,” he agreed.  “But they have such useful things.”

“Do they ever come here?” Olivia asked, and gestured vaguely at the walls around them.  “Inside the mountain?”

He slid her a troubled glance and turned away to rummage unnecessarily through the tins and jars on his food shelf.  Most of them were empty.  “We can’t allow ourselves to be discovered,” he said, which was, she supposed, a much kinder way of saying, ‘Yes, Olivia, and we kill them.’  But then he said, “Humans very rarely go any further than the trails they make for their metal boxes to roll upon, and those trails end far from Hollow Mountain.  They come to the forest, and sometimes to the foothills, but no further.  They just make their little camps, sleep a while, and go away.  Strange thing to do,” he muttered, and looked at her curiously. “Why do they do that, Olivia?”

“It feels good to be outside,” she answered, and then had to pretend not to see the pained look on his face or feel the new weight in his silence.

“I arranged for you to spend part of the day with some of the other humans,” he said finally.  “Perhaps you would like to have a bath first, since you’re awake so early.”

She gave him a broad smile, trying to make up for the awkwardness of their earlier moments.  “I would like that very much,” she said.  “Lead the way.”  She took up her new claws and climbed down the chimney by herself while he watched, but did not protest when he carried her down the Deep Drop.  That was a climb she was in no big hurry to make.

The baths weren’t empty this time.  Two female gullan were lounging idly in one of the bubbling pools, speaking in low voices.  One of them gave a sharp cry of alarm when she saw Olivia, and they both stared.

“Hello,” Olivia said.

“This is Olivia,” Vorgullum added pointedly.

The two females ducked low to confer, their lowered voices barely registering to Olivia’s ears.  One of them peeked over the edge of the pool as Olivia began to undress and made a gagging sound.

Olivia was almost offended, until she thought again of how she must appear to them.  Even to her own eyes, she was pasty, although she objected to the misconception that her naked skin was slimy.  Far from the rich, glossy pelt that meant good health on a gullan, Olivia had only a patch of unnaturally long hair on her head, and a wooly dark thatch over her crotch.  She had no wings, no horns, a flat face and flat teeth, and squinty little eyes with too much white in them.  And that made her wonder a bit about Vorgullum, who had admitted he’d come to find her attractive. 

As she and her kinky gullan mate slipped into one of the pools, the two gullan females noisily clambered out.  Both had patches of balding skin showing through their pelts, and one of them had a slightly twisted gait as she walked.    They looked lean and powerful as they moved, but they had some feminine softness about them somewhere because they jiggled in the right places as they brushed each other down and briskly fastened on fresh loincloths.  Neither showed any signs of self-consciousness about their nudity.

They made token nods as they left, but started talking as soon as they’d crossed the threshold.  She heard her name several times as their voices receded into the hall, and smiled.

“I,” Vorgullum said, scowling, “find nothing humorous in what they are saying.”

“I have yet to find one of your kind who thought humans were attractive the first time they saw one,” she returned.  “Present company included.  So tell me.  Beth’s mate was so shy about sleeping in the same pit with me, but those two don’t mind at all dressing or being undressed in front of us?”

He looked confused.  “Why would they?”

“There’s nothing, oh I don’t know, sexually provocative about a naked body?”

“Not in a bath,” he said, baffled.  “There’s nothing sexual about a bath!”

“There certainly was in the last one we had together,” she remarked, and he flicked water at her with a quick grin.  “Are you trying to tell me we were the first?”

“That was different.”

“How?”

“We were alone then.”

“And that makes it less a bath?”

“You…Olivia, everyone takes a bath without clothing.  Even humans, yes?”

“Of course.”

“But humans never couple in the bath?”

“Occasionally.”

“And humans do this in front of others?”

“No.”

“There you are!” he said.  “You bathed before me back at the human hive and I thought nothing of your body then, except that it was so bald and white.  When you bathe with other humans, does it arouse you?”

“Except for when we’re very young and can’t be trusted not to drown ourselves, humans don’t bathe together,” she said.

He looked absolutely astonished by this fact.  “Why not?”

“I suspect it arouses us.”

“Be serious.”

“The tubs are too small,” she replied, straight-faced.  “And too far apart.”

“Ah.”  He thought about it for a little.  “But you make the…tubs.  I know you do.  You could make them any size, put them anywhere at all!”

He had her there, and she thought he probably knew it.  She thought fast.  “It’s more complicated than that,” she said, dropping her hand to the edge of the bath and hoisting herself out.  “But I will say that when two grown humans do share a bath, it nearly always ends in coupling.”

“Yours is a very strange race.”

They dried and dressed and went to the commons.  He let her climb partway up the Deep Drop, plucking her easily off the wall when she tired (which came only about ten feet up, she was embarrassed to see), and carrying her the rest of the way.

Cheyenne and the madwoman were already there, along with a lone male gulla at the very far end of the commons who sat on a bench in an unobtrusive spot, watching them and looking bored.  The madwoman sat on the floor while Cheyenne leaned against the wall with her arms folded.  She saw Olivia and gave her hair an terse little flip by way of greeting.